Category: spoton

Kevin: Good piece looking at location and social networking. I've started using FourSquare recently, and as a Nokia smartphone owner, I suffer from lack of a native app. I know that I'm just starting to scratch the surface of it, but for me, FourSquare is too narrowly pitched. I find the game element artificial. FourSquare has a lot of mindshare at the moment, but for me Twitter has more utility. (Having said that I didn't quite see the utility of Twitter when I first started using it.) I do agree that the promoted tweets based on your location has great potential as a revenue stream for Twitter.

Kevin: Fourwhere promises to help journalists see what is happening at a specific location. From a business standpoint, Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp all have built their business on checking in with mostly commercial locations. It makes sense from the standpoint of building a business for these services, but it doesn't necessarily build up a full view of what is happening on a location. If the location-based services started to provide other types of check-ins, it could provide a broader service. Conversely, journalism organisations could start providing more comprehensively geo-tagged content that could be sold to these services. Will they build the infrastructure to do it? Or will they miss another opportunity to develop a revenue stream and financially support journalism?